Posts tagged ‘stupidity’

In the last dozen years or so the number of sandwich vans visiting office blocks and industrial parks has exploded to the extent that the park I work on is now visited by more sandwich vans than delivery vans.

So how, with such competition, can they all be so crap? Lets take a look at the vans that visit my particular building… Read the rest of this entry »

Let this be a lesson to you all – if you have a fish tank, keep the KH up. And, if you forget and your KH keeps dropping, don’t do a 25% water change of RO water. Especially if you tank was running at about 8.5pH and the RO is (apparently) at 5pH.

The government has decided to ‘help’ the car industry by giving a £2000 discount on new cars if you scrap a car that’s more than 10 years old.

The discount will be funded 50/50 by the government and the industry.

Before you party too much, lets take a look at the figures…

You know that £2000 50/50? Well, car manufacturers are amongst the only industry to have put their list pricesup this year. A Ford Focus convertible (for example) is a £1000 more expensive than last year. That £1000 that will now be discounted in this scheme.

You know the carbon that this will save? Well, lets assume you drive a ten year old Jeep Cherokee 3.7l Automatic – you know, a good low emissions car. That chugs through 333g of carbon/km. Replacing it with a new car will generate 10-20000lb of carbon. I’ll do the maths for you… you could do 17,000miles on the carbon generated just by the production of your new car.

Assume you replaced your Jeep with a Prius. That Prius is still generating 103g/km… So with the fuel your Prius has burnt on those 17,000 miles, you could do another 6,000 miles in the Jeep.

You’re looking at over 25,000 miles before the Prius’ even coming close…

So, we’re supporting a crap industry who are ‘discounting’ money they’ve already added while the world is in recession. We’re pumping out carbon for no gain. We’re destroying our future classic cars by crushing good quality cars that have yet to start appreciating back up past the £2000 mark.

There are (thankfully rare) times when you need to force your system to pass PHP session values as URL query strings instead of as cookie values. In my case it was with American cell phone operators who have set their gateways to claim that they accept cookies and then ditch them silently.

In theory you can force PHP to transmit its cookie IDs as query strings in the php.ini or the htaccess files, however that’s often not available to those on shared boxes.

Yes, we’re talking about an issue that effects a small number of people here. Sadly, due to a server configuration issue, I’m one of them.

Overnight there was an inch of snow. One whole fucking inch. How has the world reacted? By panicing. The roads in town are jammed and the police are advising people don’t drive.

You useless fuckers. Learn how to drive.

For christs sakes, there was a woman on the radio yesterday (the font of all knowledge Sara Cox, no less) talking about how dangerous the roads were and how she started braking and the car just slid, and kept sliding and she couldn’t do anything, and how she had to just sit there as the car slid and slid and danced across the road and…

You know what? Here’s a fucking idea – if you are out of controll with your foot on any pedal, any pedal at all, take a risk, go out on a limb and TAKE YOUR FUCKING FOOT OFF THE PEDAL. You’re already out of control, it can’t get any worse.

This rant was brought to you by the weather condition ‘snow’ and the mood ‘pissed off’.

Remember ‘Spore’? It’s the new game where you develop a new species from scratch, help it evolve and grow. It’s been hyped up for ages, and it was just released.

On Amazon.com right now, the game gets 2 stars. Of the 151 votes on the reviews, 128 of them are for “1 star”. Of the nine “5 Star” rating, two are from two years ago, when no-one had played anything connected to the game.

Why is the score so low? Well, the game demands that you install Securerom and it connects to a server when you install and run the game. It’s been DRMed to death. Add in the fact that the servers are currently falling over (and so people can’t install or play the game) and it’s all going a bit wrong.

The irony of it all…? A hacked version with no DRM requirements appeared on the torrent sites FOUR DAYS before the game was released.